Proposal for a Council Decision on the position to be adopted at the next three meetings of the International Whaling Commission

The present proposal concerns a Council Decision establishing the position to be adopted on behalf of the Union related to meetings of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) under the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling (ICRW), including inter-sessional meetings and actions.

It builds on the Council Decisions that were adopted on 2 March 2009 and 13 December 2011, which allowed the Union to coordinate its position on a number of issues during three meetings of the IWC (in 2012, 2014 and 2016) including in the related inter-sessional meetings.

The multi-year nature of the previous Decisions and the stable policy approach that they provided allowed the EU and its Member States to become more pro-active on IWC matters with the result that the EU is increasingly asked by third country governments to take part in activities at short notice.

It is therefore proposed that the future Council Decision should not just govern IWC related meetings, but should also be used to act inter-sessionally, within the policy framework set out in the decision, for example in demarches.

EUR-Lex: COM(2017)463: Follow the progress of this proposal through the decision-making procedure http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/HIS/?uri=COM:2017:463:FIN

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